The People Who Have Actually Paid the Price
Maria Corina Machado has been under house arrest, released, threatened, and forced into hiding more times than her supporters can count. She is Venezuela's most prominent opposition leader and arguably the most courageous democratic activist in the Western Hemisphere right now. In January 2024, she organized the largest voter registration drive in Venezuelan history — over seven million signatures — against a regime that was counting votes before they were cast.
The Biden administration gave her rhetorical support and essentially nothing else. The Trump administration, which came into office with considerably tougher language on Maduro, has spent fifteen months sending mixed signals about oil sanctions, negotiated transitions, and the conditions under which recognition of the Maduro government would or wouldn't continue. The hard-liners in the Venezuelan and Cuban diaspora — concentrated in South Florida, with genuine political weight — are watching this and arriving at the correct conclusion: the equivocation is policy, not process.
What Regime Change Actually Requires
Regime change is not a phrase that belongs in polite foreign policy conversation, which is one reason it's never seriously attempted. The serious version of the question is: what conditions are necessary for the Maduro and Cuban regimes to lose power, and which of those conditions can the United States meaningfully influence?
On Venezuela: Maduro's survival depends on oil revenue, Russian and Chinese diplomatic cover, Cuban security apparatus cooperation, and the demoralization of a domestic opposition that has been beaten repeatedly. The United States controls meaningful levers on the first and has potential influence on the fourth. The Trump administration's oil sanctions were the most effective pressure tool deployed against the regime in a decade — they forced real economic pain and created the conditions under which the 2024 election fraud became an acute crisis rather than a routine one.
Then the administration started issuing waivers. Chevron got a license to continue operating in Venezuela. The sanctions architecture, which had been built carefully to maximize pressure while protecting civilian populations, started developing holes. The diaspora hard-liners noticed. They're not wrong.
Cuba is a different problem with some similar dynamics. The regime in Havana is older, more institutionalized, and has survived eleven American presidencies by now. But it's also more fragile than it's been in decades — the July 2021 protests were the largest in Cuban history, and the regime's response, which included prison sentences of up to twenty-five years for protesters, revealed how afraid it actually was. The Biden administration's failure to respond to those protests with anything meaningful was one of the clearest foreign policy failures of that administration. The Trump team came in promising different.
Frustration as a Policy Signal
I served two tours in the Army, including time working with partner forces in Latin America. I understand that regime change is not a switch you flip, that transitions produce instability, and that unintended consequences multiply in proportion to how little you understand the country you're operating in. These are real constraints.
But constraints are not the same as excuses, and the diaspora hard-liners aren't asking for an invasion. They're asking for consistent sanctions enforcement, meaningful diplomatic support for opposition leaders who are risking their lives, and a clear statement from the American government that the Maduro and Castro regimes do not have a path to legitimacy through negotiated arrangements that leave their power structures intact.
That's not an extreme position. That's a position that follows from American values, American strategic interests in the Western Hemisphere, and basic human decency toward people whose governments have imprisoned, tortured, and exiled them for wanting elections to mean something.
The equivocation isn't pragmatism. It's a choice. And the diaspora communities who've been living with the consequences of that choice for sixty years in Cuba's case are entitled to say so, loudly, until someone in Washington decides to listen.
